In Memoriam: Samuel Menashe

Ultimately, all the arts converge to present the image of a world moment as reflected in the uniqueness of a single soul—and vice versa. The Times obituary, by William Grimes, for the New York poet Samuel Menashe, who died Monday at the age of eighty-five, offers a detail and a remark that should resonate with fans of film noir—and with anyone who has been through war or who knows anyone who has been through war, which is to say, with pretty much everyone:

He enrolled in Queens College but left in 1943 to enlist in the Army. As an infantryman with the 87th Division, he fought his way through France, Belgium and Germany. In a single day during the Battle of the Bulge, all but 29 members of his company of 190 men were either killed, wounded or taken prisoner.

“When I came back, I heard people talking about what they were going to do next summer,” he told The New York Times in 2003. “I was amazed that they could talk of that future, next summer. As a result, I lived in the day. For the first few years after the war, each day was the last day. And then it changed. Each day was the only day.”

My colleagues and I chatted in the office a few days ago about the hectic delights of film noir, and the question was where it came from; my hypothesis is that it was born of an unholy trinity of influences: first, the model of directorial liberation offered by Orson Welles with “Citizen Kane”; second, the influx of directors who left Germany in the nineteen-thirties and found refuge in Hollywood; and, third, the post-traumatic stress of returning soldiers who, in the glory of victory and in an era when silent endurance was an element of valor, had little outlet or salve for their agonies.

The despair and the panic, the sense of no future and a nightmare past that Menashe describes, is familiar from the existential cinema of film noir, with its sweaty brow and its blank and terrified gazes or its furtively avid glances—the look of Robert Ryan and Dana Andrews. Menashe, a poet of condensed style and visionary substance, seized the day and, indeed, the moment; it’s as if all existence were condensed to a glint—the line of fire, the tiny glimmer that Alvin York (as played by Gary Cooper, in Howard Hawks’s film “Sergeant York”), the pacifist turkey-hunter turned First World War hero, gets from the lick of spit he dabs on the front sight of his rifle—but turned, in the mirror of art and memory, on him.